"Put Off Anger" (Col. 3:8)

Give us grace to be just and upright in all our dealings; quiet and peaceable; full of compassion; and ready to do good to all men, according to our abilities and opportunities.  (From the Morning Family Prayer, 1928 BCP, 588-589)

I have struggled with many a besetting sin in my life, but without doubt the most enduring and vexing is the sin of anger.  By God's grace  - and only by God's grace - I have made strides in my struggle with this particular work of the flesh, but I still struggle with it daily.   Its expression is mostly internal, but sometimes I allow it to go "loud,"  mostly when I'm driving alone in my truck as I listen to the news and talk radio.   If there is one thing that gets my anger turbine ramped up, it is politics and the culture wars.  Sometimes my anger goes loud in my online writing as well.

But St. John Cassian put it well when he said, in essence, that anger dulls the intellect.  And indeed anger has caused me to do some pretty stupid things in my life.  But it's not just the concern over being stupid that vexes me so much; it is the fact that anger can destroy.  As James said, the wrath of man does not advance the righteousness of God, all our righteous talk about "righteous indignation" nothwithstanding.  The apostle tells me to bear the fruit of the Spirit, not the works of the flesh, and one of those works is anger.  And if I am ever to be a pastor, the apostle also enjoins me to "gently correct those who are in opposition, if God perhaps will grant them repentance, so that they may know the truth. . . ." 

So pray for me brethren.  For me this one goes deep, and it therefore promises to be a hell of a struggle.  I'm going to begin by "going Amish" on the culture wars thing.  I believe that war is lost, and that our Western culture is going to have to crash and burn.  If God so wills, a new Christian culture will arise from its ashes.  Regardless, I believe the time for me has come to tend to the work of the Kingdom. If, unless the eschaton occurs first, new communities arise just as they did when the Roman Empire crashed and burned, so be it.  But that is no longer an immediate concern.